The Near Witch

by V. E. Schwab

  “What? But we need those bones now! She’ll come back tonight.”

  “Go home, dearie,” Magda says, her gnarled hand closing over mine. I realize I’ve been gripping the table.

  “Do not leave your sister’s side,” says Dreska.

  “And in the morning,” adds Magda, “you come straight here, dearie, and we will put things right.” She gives my hand a pat and slips away.

  “You just come back in the morning, Lexi,” Dreska chimes. “Everything will be all right.” There’s that stupid phrase again. People are always saying it, and it’s never true. I give her a look that says as much.

  “Go home, Lexi,” she says in a different voice, softer, like the one she used with my father. Dreska ushers me to the door. Her long bony fingers graze my shoulders. “We’ll put things in their proper place.” I step outside. The sky is red.

  “Everything will be all right,” she repeats, and this time I don’t fight it. I don’t disagree.

  How? asks a voice inside me, but it’s sinking, slipping beneath something warm like blankets.

  * * *

  Somehow I make my way home. My feet must take me, clever things, since I don’t find the path with my eyes.

  My house comes into sight, and with it, Otto, Tyler, and Bo. They are standing in the doorway, bathed in the red light. Bo cocks his head to the side. Tyler’s back is to me. Otto catches sight of me, and even in my daze I expect him to go into a rage. But there’s only grim fatigue. It’s not a victorious look. It’s one that says I might not have won yet, but you’ve lost.

  I push past them, past my mother, who knew I would come back. She casts me a glance, a look exchanged between prisoners of sorts, before turning to the oven. I shrug the cloak off, free my feet from the boots, and go to drop them out the window. But the window is still locked from the outside, the wood still freshly splintered from the nails. I rub my eyes and let the boots fall to the floor with a thud, before slipping out of my dress and into my nightgown.

  Every inch of me aches for sleep. How long has it been since I slept? There is still an hour until dark. I can rest, just a little, and be wide awake to guard Wren tonight. I peel the covers back, slide beneath them, and sleep folds over me, welcome and warm, and complete.

  26

  The first thing I realize is that the room is dark.

  I’ve slept too long, and panic floods me, but then I see that Wren is fast asleep and safe, tucked beneath the blankets. The night has settled in around us, the wind humming through the window cracks and the floorboards and the space beneath the door.

  My thoughts come to me thick and slow. That cottony numbness is still here, filling my chest. I drag myself from the bed, meaning to light the candles, when the room tilts, my body and mind still caught in the dregs of sleep. I pause against the bed, waiting for the dizziness to pass. And then I hear the voice. One soft, simple name, faded at the edges.

  My name. Lexi. The wind is playing tricks on me again. My eyes wander sleepily to the window, to the moor beyond, expecting to see nothing.

  But there is a person standing there in the darkness. Waiting in the field, just beyond the village line, a foot or so across the seam where Near meets the northern moor, someone tall and thin and crowlike.

  “Cole?” I ask. When he doesn’t vanish, I drift in my lovely haze, my almost-sleep, to the window, forgetting the nails that pin it shut. I press my hands against the surface and look through, heat fogging the glass around my fingertips. Outside, the wind picks up, and the windowpane quivers. Cole tips his head to the side, and the nails tremble, then begin to slide up and loose and away, falling to the grass. I push the window open; it creaks once and then glides up silently beneath my fingers. The sound beyond the glass is stronger. The wind whistles past me into the room, rippling any surface that can peel away.

  I hesitate, glancing back at my sister’s sleeping form beneath the blankets, but she is sound asleep, the bracelet fastened around her wrist.

  Outside, the moor is cool and dark, and I climb through the window, nearly tripping over my own feet. I latch the shutters hastily. I want to see Cole, his face and his river-stone eyes, and know why he has left me, and how he has come back, and what has happened. He wavers once, and I want to feel his skin and know that he is there. I cross the small stretch of land in only my nightgown, numb to the rough and tangled earth beneath my bare feet and the cold night against my arms.

  “Cole,” I call again, and this time he makes a motion toward me, holding out his hand. As I draw near, I see that it is him. I close my eyes, find it difficult to open them again as he takes my hand, his fingers oddly cool as they intertwine with mine. He is not hesitant, not flinching. On the contrary, his grip is firm, pulling me toward him. It makes my heart leap in a strange way, not unlike when I am tracking and catch sight of my prey, and all my nerves bristle beneath my skin, alert. He embraces me in silence, and the wind curves playfully around us.

  “Are you all right?” I ask, running my fingertips over him. “You’re alive. Cole, they said… I heard them…” He says nothing, only pulls me along, out onto the moor, and I follow, delirious with relief.

  “Where have you been? What happened?” I am angry that he left, that he let them take him away. I tug back.

  “Cole, say something.” I try to turn toward my home, toward Near, when he pulls me to him again, pressing me against his cool, wind-touched form. His cheek brushes mine. I feel like I’m forgetting something, but then his lips find my lips and his kiss knocks the air out of me.

  “Follow me,” he whispers in my ear, his breath cold against my face. I feel my legs bend beneath me, and I will them to keep me up as I let him lead me, and he adds, “I’ll tell you everything.”

  “What happened? Where did Otto take you?” The questions pour out. “Where did you go?”

  “I’ll show you,” he says, so low and hushed that the sounds barely seem like words at all.

  “I found the bones,” I say. Cole’s grip on me tightens for only a moment, and his face darkens, but the shadow passes and his eyes grow calm. The wind picks up around us, and he holds me tightly, his arm wrapped around my waist as he guides me across the moor. Whenever I resist or ask him to explain, he pauses and turns to me, his eyes looking down into mine, and brings his hand to my chin. I feel my face grow hot beneath his palm. When he kisses my forehead, it’s like a raindrop on my skin.

  “Cole,” I whisper, confused and relieved at once, but then he kisses me again, really kisses me, cool and ghostly smooth. There is no fear in his kiss, no uncertainty. He kisses me and brushes the back of his hand against my flushed cheek and leads me away, out onto the hills. I barely even notice the village disappearing behind us. I yawn and lean on him in the darkness, sure that this is a dream, that perhaps I have slipped to the wooden floor in the bedroom of my mother’s home. And here, in this dream, Cole is alive and we are walking. I can feel and see him beside me, but the rest of the world seems to have fallen away.

  “Where are we going?” I ask. Cole’s grip on me is strange, at once light and tightening, and I resist momentarily, focus on the motion of pushing. Pushing him back from me. Pushing with my fingertips. It takes effort. Cole stops again and turns to me.

  “Lexi,” he says in his whispering way, tracing the curves of my face with his fingertips.

  As gentle as his fingers seem, I can’t loosen their grip. I blink, the cold air and the panic gnawing its way through my chest. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be home. “Let go, Cole, and tell me what’s going on. Tell me what happened.” And then, when that still elicits nothing but more kisses, I growl, “Cole, let go!” But he doesn’t. He holds me tight with one hand, while the other, which had been on my cheek, wanders down my jaw to my neck. His fingers close around my throat. I gasp, mostly in shock, and fight his hands, but my own go through them, straight through his like they are nothing but… air.

  “I did it,” he whispers in my ear, his wind fingers tightening
around my throat. I can’t breathe.

  “Did what?” I gasp, as Cole’s stone eyes meet mine.

  Strange how much they look like real stones now.

  “I took the children.” The words break into hisses. “I took them all.”

  I try desperately to break free, to fight back, but nothing touches this Cole made of wind and stone. The dream dispels, and the world is taking shape around us again, the night thick and the hills rolling away in every direction. How have we gotten so far from the village? Even if I could scream, would the sound reach Near? Would it just melt into the wind?

  “What’s wrong, Lexi?” he asks as he chokes me. “You look upset. Hush now. Everything will be all right.” Cole begins to hum that awful tune as my pulse pounds in my ears and the wind whips around us.

  How could I have forgotten my father’s knife? I’m not even wearing shoes, I finally realize, looking down at my scratched and bleeding feet. I don’t feel it. Fear has overtaken all other feelings. I push into him with all my force, and not all of him is wind, because I connect, meet with something solid, and he steps back, lets go. I stumble to the tangled grass and wince as a stray and broken branch tears through my nightgown, scratching my leg deeply. Warmth runs over my knee.

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask, gasping for air.

  “You got in my way,” hisses Cole, and his voice is no longer his, but angrier, older. My fingers close around the branch, still tinged with my own blood, as I push myself to my feet and swing it at Cole, hard. I miss, and the wind picks up and rips it from my hands. I stumble forward. Cole, made of stone, sticks, wind, and something horrible and dark, is leaning over me.

  The wind tugs at my limbs, whistling white noise in my ears as it pulls me to my feet. And around the boy I named Cole, several sharp branches rouse themselves from the ground, floating up like leaves in the wind.

  “Good night, Lexi,” he whispers, and the branches turn their points toward me and sail through the air. Just then, something takes hold of me from behind, firm and flesh and bone. Arms close around my chest and force me down, down to the matted earth of the moor as the branches soar through the air and smash into shards against the rocks behind me.

  The angry moor-made Cole lunges forward, but the form pinning me down lets out a kind of growl, and the wind cuts through from a different side. When it touches Cole, he crumbles midstride to the ground in a heap of stones and twigs and grass. I close my eyes and fight the body on mine, trying to free myself from the warm weight of it. I throw a punch and feel it connect.

  “Dammit, Lexi,” comes a familiar voice. “It’s me.”

  I blink and find myself looking into Cole’s dark eyes, like some nightmarish duplicate of the face that just disintegrated.

  “Get away!” I cry, throwing him off and stumbling back against the rocks. “Don’t come near me.” Cole looks hurt, but I am aching, too, and confused.

  “What are you talking about?” he asks quietly, and the edges of his words are clear and crisp. He looks from me to the pile of moor things that had moments before been a frightening likeness of him.

  “It wasn’t me,” he says, approaching slowly, as if I am a deer and he’s afraid of startling me. “It wasn’t me. It’s okay.” He takes another step. His face is as pale as the moon overhead. “It’s okay.” My breaths are coming heavily, and I clutch my arms to myself but do not run.

  “I’m sorry, Lexi.” Now his fingertips graze my cheek, and they are warm and not made of wind. “It’s okay.” He slides his arms around me. “It wasn’t me.”

  I stare past him at the pile of stones. “Then who was it?”

  But by the time the question leaves my lips, I know. I step back and slide down onto one of the shorter rocks, trying to catch my breath, the shards of wood scattered around my feet. The world is not swaying as it was, though I still feel ill. The cut on my leg isn’t too deep. In fact, I don’t feel any pain. I shiver, partly from shock, and Cole peels off his cloak and wraps it around me. The shirt he has on beneath is worn and thin, and I take him in for the first time. Alive. And hurt.

  In the moonlight I see it, the stain, even darker than his shirt, that’s spread across part of his chest. I touch my fingertips to it. They come away wet.

  My uncle. My uncle did this. Or Bo. Cole takes my bloodstained hand as I pull it away, instead drawing me closer, wincing even as he does so.

  “I got away,” he says. His hand is warm in mine, and I want to throw my arms around him because he’s there and real, but the stain on his clothes, and the pain in his eyes, warn me not to. I still cannot pull my eyes from the darkness covering his shirt, and part of me is thankful it’s night and the blood is cast in black and gray instead of red.

  “I’m fine,” he says, but his jaw clenches as my fingers wander over the stain.

  “If by ‘fine’ you mean ‘bleeding,’ then yes, you are,” I snap, trying to examine the wound. I start to lift his shirt, but his hands catch mine.

  “I’ll be fine,” he corrects, easing the shirt back down and pushing my fingers gently away.

  “Let’s get you home,” he says, helping me to my feet.

  “I don’t think so, Cole. You’re the one who needs help. We need to get you to the sisters.” He’s shaking his head in that slow way Magda does. An amused smile tugs at his mouth.

  “Lexi, I left you alone for one night, and you got yourself abducted and nearly killed by the Near Witch. There’s no way I’m letting you walk home alone.” He gestures to the shards of wood at my feet, at my generally bedraggled state.

  “To be fair, it looked like you,” I say, suddenly tired. “And when you didn’t come today, I was so…” My voice trails off, finds another path. “When I saw that thing”—I point to the pile of twigs and moss and stone—“I was just so relieved…”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers, taking my hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.”

  My eyes wander to the dark stain.

  “What happened?” I can’t stop shaking my head. I feel like all my cottony padding is being pulled out, and the blood and the feeling are coming back.

  “They took me out,” he whispers, “onto the moor…” His fingers drift up to his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. I’m here.”

  “It does matter.”

  Cole slips back, and I gasp as he tugs the collar of his shirt aside enough to reveal strips of gray fabric, the lining of his worn cloak, wrapped around his shoulder, just above his heart. The gray has turned almost black where the bullet struck.

  I don’t have words for the anger bubbling up in me. “Who?” I manage to growl at last.

  “Not your uncle, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He lets go of the shirt with a wince. “He couldn’t do it. Another man took the gun.”

  “Bo,” I say. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “Better already.” The pain bites into the corners of his eyes, but he tightens his grip on my hand. He leads me back across the moor, tucking me gingerly in beside him. Despite his injuries, he seems to feel what I feel: We are each anxious that the other will blow away. And he shares the same desperate need to remind his skin of my own, to prove that he is still here and I am still here.

  “How did you survive?” I ask.

  “Not as well as I’d have liked,” he says, taking a shallow breath. “Things are going to get harder.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had no choice. Staying in control wasn’t a high priority at that moment.” He almost laughs, but stops in pain.

  “You showed yourself to them, as a witch?”

  “The only thought in my head was surviving.”

  “What did you do?”

  Cole’s arm falls away in response, and by the time I turn to face him, all of him is fading, rippling like heat. The wind picks up and blows through him, and he just bleeds away before my eyes. I turn in a circle, but he’s gone. Panic flashes through me as the wind grows, tugging at Cole’s cloak, curling itself around m
e; and moments later it’s his arms again, holding me close, eyes looking down into mine.

  “Lexi, when they led me out on the moor, for the first time in a very long while, I didn’t want to suffer. I didn’t want to lose… everything for someone else’s crimes. Would that I had realized it a little sooner,” he says, with a small pained laugh. “The only thing I could think of when he raised the gun, when he pulled the trigger, was you. Wanting to hear your voice. Wanting to feel your skin against mine. I feel connected to you, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that being severed. Lost.”

  He kisses my forehead. Mouths the words thank you against my skin.

  “Luckily for me,” he says, “the hunting party didn’t expect me to do what I did. You should have seen them. Even rabbits don’t scurry off so fast.”

  I laugh with him now because we need to laugh. I laugh as his kisses find their way down my cheek, to my lips. They leave tracks across my face, cool and smooth enough to make me pause, to make me remember the Cole of sticks and stones that kissed me with moor wind. He winces as he leans in to me, and I’m still laughing as his mouth finds mine, warm and alive. There is no cyclone around us, but the world is falling away again. Everything beyond our skin is falling away. His kisses push the moor-made Cole, the Near Witch’s Cole, from my mind. They push the fear of failing, the fear of banishment, away. His kisses push everything away.

  The darkest part of the night passes, and we keep walking. We are almost to my house. And then he stops. I realize that there’s probably a hunter, almost certainly Otto, waiting on the other side of the last hill. Cole brings his hand to his chest defensively, eyeing the slope. I take off his cloak and slip it back around him.

  “Cole,” I say, remembering. “I found her bones. The witch’s.” I don’t know why I’m suddenly excited, but I haven’t had a chance to tell him. I try to keep the smile on my face for him. He needs it. “I went back to the forest and I found them.”

  “I knew you would. What do we do now?”

  “We go back first thing in the morning,” I say.